Kerb appeal

I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about how I want to present our home and what it is going to look like as you approach our property and drive through the gate. We are staying within the Hamptons style for the facade and to some extent for the garden as well. However, we don't want to go too formal with the landscaping in an effort to maintain a large useful area not cluttered with plants on the flattest part of the block for things like soccer games etc. Towards the back of the block it slopes away quiet quickly and there will be a large cut and retaining wall in the bottom right hand corner where the shed will be so I imagine the front yard will be used frequently as well.

Our house is going to sit quiet wide on the block as we wanted to make the most of the space we are lucky enough to have. We also didn't want to have the house sitting too close to the road for the same reason, why buy an acre and a third if you plan on building right on the nature strip. We made a choice to go for space rather than water views when we were buying the land as that was what was the most important to us. As it turns out I think we have ended up with the best of both worlds, the room we wanted and a great rural view over the creek, dam and adjacent horse paddocks.

Our beautiful view and my husband and I on our first wedding anniversary.
Left hand photo credit: Vanessa Janss Photography

The stunning house built by the writer of Our Forever Home a blog I found while searching google for my own. We appear sometimes to have eerily similar taste so Louise I promise I am not stealing your ideas (however I will defiantly be borrowing some). I can't believe I haven't found your Pinterest boards previously, they are fantastic!  

We are having a similar facade to her house using a combination of render and weatherboard detailing in whites and greys but instead of the light roof we are going for a darker one.

An example of colours but lacking the weatherboard detail.

      

Along the lines of what we are thinking for colours

This is a house built from the original floor plan we started with before we made all our changes. So ours will have a similar foot print and along the same lines for style but again with a whole bunch of changes to make it our own.

We're not exactly sure how deep the cut for the house site is going to be yet until we see it. We had originally planned to batter it back on quiet a large taper to avoid having any retaining walls but in order to have the extra large turning circle/driveway we are planning we may end up having to rethink this a little. So at the moment we are just going with the flow and will see what the excavation brings when it happens (hopefully in the next week or two). If we need to put in retaining walls and steps that will most likely happen down the track at some stage when the budget recovers a bit. But I do know that I want some small box hedges to define the verandah and also large blue Hydrangeas and my favourite David Austin Roses we had on our wedding cake.


 

Our wedding cake was covered in cream David Austin Roses to match my bouquet. Wedding photo credit: Vanessa Janss Photograpghy

Blue Hydrangeas in white planter boxes either side of the front door with hanging lanterns = perfection if you ask me!

The front door colour choice is something I have gone back a forwards with many times. As we are already planning on three different colours for the facade I am cautious about bringing in another element, however I do want it to be a statement. I want a a solid wooden door with nice traditional detailing, chromed knocker and glass either side and possibly above.

At the moment I am leaning towards black but luckily I still have some time before I have to make a final decision.